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Envisioning Latour 2.0
When the young anthropologist Bruno Latour visited the laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he famously set aside all of his pre- conceptions about the goals and behaviors of its inhabitants. Rather than accept as reality the Salk researchers’ self-interpretation of their collective enterprise, he carefully observed their day-to-day activities and material practices and came to his own somewhat startling conclusion. What the scientists and technicians at Salk spent the greatest part of their day doing, noticed Latour, was “coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing” various forms of documentary material. In this they resembled nothing so much as a “strange tribe” of “compulsive and manic writers” whose principal function seemed to be the manufacture of paper docu- ments. Even their large and expensive experimental instruments acted pri- marily as “inscription devices,” technologies designed specifically to “trans- form material substance into a figure or diagram.”1 It was through these various and repeated acts of inscription and transcription, argued Latour, that ordinary data was transmuted into scientific fact.
Whatever you might think about Latour’s overall methods and analy- sis, his close attention to the material practices of scientific knowledge pro- duction inspired generations of historians and sociologists of science and technology to take seriously the notion that technique and technology are epistemologically significant. The tools we use to think with affect the char-
Nathan Ensmenger is an associate professor in the School of Informatics and Comput- ing at Indiana University. He is currently working on a book that explores the develop- ment and use of computerized decision technologies in medicine, finance, and public policy. He is particularly grateful for the contributions to this essay of William Aspray, Eden Medina, and Suzanne Moon.
©2012 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/12/5304-0001/753–76
1. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 48–51.
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The Digital Construction of Technology Rethinking the History of Computers in Society
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acter of our thoughts; to write something down is to transform it. The ma- terial culture of the laboratory is important because experimental instru- ments are agents in the production of scientific knowledge. It matters who built these instruments, and how, and for what purposes; it matters how these instruments are used, and by whom. These are no longer controver- sial assertions, even outside the narrow confines of the academic literature on science and technology studies.
Given that the close observation of material practices has proven such a productive methodology, it is curious how little attention has been paid within the historical community to the single most widespread and signif- icant innovation that has occurred within the material culture of the labo- ratory—and indeed, almost every site of scientific or technoscientific activ- ity in contemporary society.
Let us imagine, for a moment, that Latour were to return to the Salk In- stitute of the present to revisit his observations of four decades previous. There are many things about the institute that would be familiar: the stark modernism of the Louis Kahn–designed architecture; the academic creden- tials and distinctions of the research staff and their ambitious young post- doctoral fellows; the perpetual conversational obsession with publications, priority, and position. Latour might even recognize some old friends, or at least familiar faces. And yet there would be one striking and obvious differ- ence that would be immediately evident: with the possible exception of the janitorial staff, every single employee of the Salk Institute would spend the majority of their time each day interacting with a computer screen. From scientist to secretary, their work would revolve around computer technol- ogy. Even those operating experimental instruments or other equipment would do so via a computer-based interface. In fact, to a naive observer, it might seem as if the designated role of most of the Salk researchers and technicians was simply to shuffle from one computer screen to another, with little perceptible differences among the activities engaged in at each loca- tion. Every room in the institute would contain at least one computer, and it would be difficult to distinguish between the computers in the rooms des- ignated as “laboratories” and those labeled as “offices” (whether faculty or administrative). There would be entire rooms devoted to computers, some of which would only rarely be visited by human beings. All of the comput- ers in the institute would be networked to every other, and computers would serve as the primary means of communication both within the institute and to the outer world. There would be nary a piece of actual paper in sight— with the possible exception of the Ph.D. diplomas hanging on the office walls, which would be as likely to reflect degrees in the fields of computer science and bioinformatics as in molecular biology.
It might be that our hypothetical Latour version 2.0 would explain away the pervasive presence of computers and other digital technologies in the laboratory as simply being the modern incarnation of the inscription
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device. After all, the majority of these technologies would be used, at least in part, for the creation of digital documents. In fact, the very essence of all of these machines could be described as being literary, their primary func- tion being the reading and writing of codes—albeit codes intended to be read primarily by machines rather than people. Seen from this perspective, there would be no significant difference, at least in analytical terms, be- tween the traditional version of a scientific “paper” and its electronic equiv- alent, or between the tracings on the paper tape of a 1960s-era gas chro- matograph and the digital representation of the same produced by a more modern instrument. The larger interpretation of the laboratory would remain essentially the same, with the computer being merely the most con- venient contemporary tool available to perform the more timeless and ab- stract tasks associated with scientific knowledge production.
To dismiss so easily this dramatic transformation of material practice would, however, run counter to the entire theoretical and methodological revolution in science studies that Latour himself played such a key role in en- abling. It would also require him to ignore the visible evidence of another, perhaps even more profound incorporation of computer technology into the modern biological laboratory. Scattered across the Salk Institute are buildings whose very names—the Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology, the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, the Razavi Newman Center for Bioinformatics—bear witness to the centrality of the computer not just to the production, but to the content of scientific knowledge. Lily Kay, among others, has documented the ways in which concepts from computer science and information theory disseminated throughout the biological sciences in the late twentieth century. It is now commonplace, for example, to talk about the human genome as a code to be decrypted, the brain as a neural network, and disease as a “subspecies of in- formation malfunction or communications pathology.”2 These are not mere metaphors, but statements about ontology. As the noted biologist Richard Dawkins described it, “genetics has become a branch of information tech- nology. The genetic code is truly digital, in exactly the same way as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth.”3 For many work- ing in the modern biological sciences, living cells are not like computers— they are computers. While the long-term utility and durability of this com- putational turn in biology might still be an open question, the existence of the phenomenon is undeniable. Without presuming to know the mind of Latour, it seems safe to assume that if he were to repeat his visit to the Salk Institute, he would both notice and take seriously the transformative power of the electronic digital computer and its kindred technologies.
2. Lily Kay, “Who Wrote the Book of Life?”; Hunter Crowther-Heyck, “George A. Miller, Language, and the Computer Metaphor of Mind”; Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto”; Cornelius Borck, “Toys Are Us.”
3. Richard Dawkins, “Genetics” (emphasis added).
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The pervasive ubiquity of the computer and the computational mindset are hardly confined to the Salk Institute or the biological sciences. In the past several decades, computational models and techniques have transformed the theory and practice of disciplines as diverse as physics, economics, psy- chology, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, meteorology, cognitive sci- ence, and ecology. The dominance of the computer in the practice of engi- neering has been especially dramatic: until the final stages of production, it is not unusual for a manufactured good to live an almost entirely virtual existence. Engineers use computer-aided design tools to construct digital models, evaluate those digital models using computational techniques like finite element analysis, and test their performance in virtual environments via virtual instruments before transmitting their designs in digital form over electronic networks to computer-controlled machine tools. Many of the products that these engineers design with computers contain their own computers embedded within them: microprocessor-based control systems are used as key components in everything from automobiles to elevators, from refrigerators to pacemakers, from electronic books to children’s toys. In fact, there are few technologies, industries, or social practices that have not been significantly influenced, if not radically transformed, by the incor- poration of computers and computer-based technologies.
Outside of the academic historical literature, the centrality of the com- puter to contemporary social, political, and economic life is widely recog- nized. No technological development of the past century is considered to be as profoundly influential as the invention of the electronic digital com- puter. Indeed, in most contemporary contexts, the word “technology” has come to mean computer technology. When educators advocate for more technology in the classroom, medical practitioners for more technology in the hospital, and economists for the development of a more technology- proficient workforce, they are not talking about filing cabinets, stetho- scopes, or drill-press operators; what they are calling for is more comput- ers, computer-based diagnostic systems, and computer-savvy technicians. There is a vast and growing popular literature on the impact of computer- ization on almost every aspect of modern society. And while historians of technology are right to be skeptical of the hyperbole and simplistic deter- minism that characterizes much of this literature, we also ignore it at our peril, as David Edgerton has recently suggested.4 By not engaging more substantially with the technological phenomena that most of our contem- poraries regard as one of the most consequential of all in human history, historians of technology run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant, losing our voice in a conversation to which we, of all disciplines, are uniquely prepared to contribute.
But what exactly does the history of technology have to say to the broad
4. David Edgerton, “Innovation, Technology, or History.”
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range of questions raised by the hegemonic technological, intellectual, and ideological dominance of computers, computing, and the computational mindset? Thus far our contributions have largely been confined to the his- tory of the computer, which is a worthy topic and one that capitalizes on our traditional strengths of studying engineers, innovation, and industries. But this focus on the machinery of computation also limits our ability to speak to larger questions. Consider, for example, the many computers we noticed earlier in our imagined tour of the Salk Institute: in terms of their underlying physical architecture they would be essentially identical, com- modity hardware such as could be purchased anywhere by anyone. But each of these generic machines would be transformed, depending on the software program it was running, into an almost infinite range of specific devices, from word processor to communications tool to simulation model to (no doubt surreptitiously) video game console. Historians of technology are only just beginning to come to terms with the history of software, a sub- ject of even larger scope and complexity than the history of the hardware that runs it. And as for the larger history of computerization, as it trans- formed the ways in which the Salk biologists conceptualize and practice their discipline, or engineers and architects design and build things, or artists make music, movies, or photographs, or average citizens communi- cate, consume, and interact with their environment—these are obviously not just one history but many, all linked in fundamental and significant ways by their shared reliance on the vast sociotechnological network of computers, microprocessors, and other digital devices.
It may be that the story of the computerization or, as I will argue, the digitization of modern society is too massive, recent, or amorphous a topic for any one discipline to claim in its entirety. Communications depart- ments, information schools, interdisciplinary programs in the digital humanities, and the emerging discipline of internet studies have all laid claim to some of this territory, and for legitimate reasons. But many of these approaches are frustratingly ahistorical, adopting unquestioningly the claims of computer enthusiasts and internet utopians that we are living through a technological revolution unprecedented in all of human history. There is a desperate need for historians of technology, with their long tra- dition of providing nuanced, theoretically sophisticated analyses of tech- nological and cultural developments, to provide some historical context for understanding these phenomena.
In this essay I will explore the ways in which the history of science and technology has thus far engaged with the history of computers, computing, computerization, and other closely related technologies and practices. I will argue for a new approach toward integrating these histories and addressing more directly the broader questions being raised by academics in other dis- ciplines, by policy makers and business leaders, and by the larger general public.
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Whither the History of Computing?
The conventional classification used within the history of technology discipline to designate works dealing with the topics outlined above is “his- tory of computing.” For most of the past few decades this has been a serv- iceable category, covering in theory both machines (computers) and proc- esses (computing). In recent years, as our understanding of the relevant histories of modern-day ICTs (information and communications tech- nologies) and other digital devices has expanded to include a whole host of developments and technologies for which no one term is a satisfactorily comprehensive descriptor—including, for example, the data-processing machines that predated the electronic digital computer, such as the me- chanical tabulating machine, or the many communication devices whose histories are essential to understanding the social and technological archi- tecture of the contemporary smart-phone—specialists in the history of computing have experimented with using other unifying concepts around which to organize their respective disciplines. For example, it is no coinci- dence that so many of these historians hold positions in schools of infor- mation, given that the seemingly universal desire to manage and control in- formation is a common theme in much of their work. This said, “history of computing” remains the dominant, catchall term for describing all these subdisciplines.
Within the history of computing literature, the primary concern has been the development of the electronic digital computer. This represents both the popular understanding of what is the most significant innovation in the history of computing, as well as the background of many of the ear- liest historians working in this area. These included many computer pro- fessionals-turned-amateur historians who, like many non-academic histo- rians of technology, were concerned primarily with the key moments of invention and questions of priority.5 The academic historians who wrote about computing tended to have backgrounds in the history of science, mathematics, or technology, and although they produced much more sophisticated histories, they also tended to address questions of interest to their respective disciplines and focus on the contributions of the tradi- tional academic, scientific, and engineering elites. As a result, these histo- ries gravitated naturally toward the high-status activities associated with the design and theorization of computers, rather than toward the more mundane work of actual computation. To the degree that they dealt with computing, as opposed to the computer, they focused almost exclusively on scientific computing. In the popular literature, of course, the emphasis has always been on great men and important “firsts,” on the massive early arti-
5. Herman Lukoff, From Dits to Bits; David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from Univac; Michael Williams, A History of Computing Technology; Alice Rowe Burks, Who Invented the Computer?
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facts that now look so impressive mounted in museums, and on the lineage of technological descent from past accomplishments that best explains the shape of things in the present.
It did not take long, however, for the academic historians at least to dis- cover a history of computing that predated the invention of the electronic digital computer, and that challenged the very centrality of the computer in that history. Most obvious were the immediate precursors of the large-scale electronic-computing experiments of the World War II period, including mechanical calculating machines, human computing projects, and analog- electric cybernetic control systems.6 It turned out that there were also entire industries devoted to information and data processing, such as the business machines industry, whose origins were distinct from those of scientific computing and pursued an entirely different technological trajectory, but which came to define during the immediate postwar period not only the technical architecture of the electronic computer, but also its cultural meaning and social significance.7 In fact, the “Cambrian explosion” of in- novation that occurred in the business machines industry during the last decades of the nineteenth century, which produced most of the firms, such as IBM, Burroughs, Honeywell, and Remington Rand, that would later play such formative roles in the early commercial computer industry, was at least as significant in the history of modern computing as the later innova- tions that would emerge from the wartime experiments with electronic cal- culating machines.8 The fact that none of these companies viewed them- selves as being primarily involved in “computing,” at least for the first half-century or more of their existences, complicated our understanding of what the history of computing was really about. In their excellent (and ex- traordinarily durable) historical synthesis of this second generation of his- tory-of-computing literature, Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray characterized the computer as “the information machine,” which aptly cap- tured this new perspective on relevant history—or histories, as Michael Mahoney repeatedly argued is the more appropriate description.9
The expansion of the history of computing to include more informa- tion-processing technologies than just the electronic computer opened up the field to a broader range of participants as well. Historians looking beyond the manufacturing of computers began asking questions about how computers were used, by whom, and for what purposes. They uncovered the crucial contributions made by nonelite actors like technicians, opera-
6. Paul Ceruzzi, Reckoners; David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human; David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine.
7. James Beniger, The Control Revolution; JoAnne Yates, Control through Communi- cation; Alfred Chandler and James Cortada, A Nation Transformed by Information.
8. James Cortada, Before the Computer; Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion.
9. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer; Michael S. Mahoney, “The Histories of Computing(s).”
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tors, and programmers, and in doing so rediscovered the significant pres- ence of women in computing.10 They also revealed the ideological dimen- sions of the computer revolution: far from being an inevitable consequence of economic rationality, the desire to computerize was often driven by the need for centralized administrative control, or to advance individual or professional agendas, or simply to appear cutting-edge and “shiny.”11 For a wide variety of efficiency experts, systems men, management consultants, and government officials, the novel and as yet inchoate technology of elec- tronic computing represented the ideal tool with which to achieve goals that already had been decided on. In this case, computerization was a means to an end, not the end in itself. But although this new generation of historians of computing engaged explicitly with other historical literatures like those of business, labor, and social history, they continued to take seriously the centrality of technology in the larger structures of power and processes of social change. To borrow from a felicitous phrase from Jon Agar’s history of computing initiatives in the British civil service, historians of computing were “putting the ‘bureau’ back into ‘bureaucracy.’”12 In doing so, they not only enriched the specialist history of computing literature, but reminded historians in other subdisciplines that any serious study of mid- to late- twentieth-century history would necessarily have to engage with innova- tions in computing and information technology.
The Protean Machine
Perhaps the most promising development in the recent literature on the history of computing has been the increasing focus on software. The his- tory of software has long been recognized as a critical subject of historical inquiry, but it is only in the past decade that historians have developed the tools and methods to write about it effectively. While the significance of software is widely acknowledged, coming to terms with it from a historical perspective has proven extraordinarily difficult.13
First, a note on why software is so central to our modern understand- ing of what computers are and what they can be used for. The first elec- tronic digital computers were designed as special-purpose machines un- derstood primarily in terms of existing traditions of mechanical (or at least
10. Jennifer Light, “When Computers Were Women”; Marie Hicks, “Only the Clothes Changed”; Nathan Ensmenger, “Making Programming Masculine.”
11. Thomas Haigh, “The Chromium-Plated Tabulator”; Nathan Ensmenger, “Let- ting the ‘Computer Boys’ Take Over”; Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries; Joseph A. November, Biomedical Computing; Christopher D. McKenna, The World’s Newest Pro- fession.
12. Jon Agar, The Government Machine, 6. 13. Ulf Hashagen, Reinhard Keil-Slawik, and Arthur L. Norberg, eds., History of Com-
puting; Martin Campbell-Kelly, “The History of the History of Software”; Michael S. Mahoney, “What Makes the History of Software Hard.”
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14. Seymour Papert, Mindstorms, viii. 15. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self.
mechanically assisted) calculation. But it was soon realized that, by reengi- neering these devices to eliminate the distinction between the operating instructions of the device (its program) and the data on which it operated, the electronic digital computer could be reinvented—and reconceptual- ized—as a universal logic machine. It is this inherent flexibility, and its abil- ity to be programmed via software to serve an almost infinite number of purposes, that makes the electronic digital computer such a powerful and compelling technology. Given the right software, an electronic digital com- puter can simulate, control, or even replicate almost any other complex technological, social, or even biological system. “What the gears cannot do the computer might,” the pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert famously suggested, “The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate.”14 While the perceived universality of the computer has certainly been overstated, it is clear that it is software, as much as the computer itself, that makes such claims and predictions plausible.
Software is also what defines our relationship to the computer. It is what we experience when we interact with the machine. It turns the generic, com- modity computer configuration—screen, keyboard, and the (quite literally) black boxes that contain all of its essential circuity—into a multipurpose collection of capabilities that reflects our particular requirements and desires, such as an email client, word processor, media player, simulated oscilloscope, or a collection of virtual Angry Birds, among many other things. We might not know what kind of computer we are using or who manufactured it, but we definitely know what software we are currently run- ning. It is software that provides the computer with such an unusual degree of sustained interpretive flexibility, and software that provides the computer with much of its perceived economic, social, and cultural significance.15
The idea that it is the software that defines the computer is not some mere flight of fancy sprung from the fevered imagination of a postmodern theorist, but is rather the essence of all modern theories of computation. For present-day computer scientists, the computer is by definition a ma- chine that runs a certain kind of software program; whether the machine is electronic, digital, biological, or even material is irrelevant. What matters is that it can run software. It is this notion of the abstract computer, the Pla- tonic ideal known as the universal Turing machine, that renders the com- putational mindset so compelling—and indeed, so hegemonic. Any system that can be described in terms of a Turing machine is a type of computer and can be understood using computational terminology. This is what al- lows Dawkins to describe the genome as computer code, the physicist Ste- phen Wolfram to conclude that the universe is fundamentally digital, and
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16. Dawkins, “Genetics”; Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science; Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works.
17. John W. Tukey, “The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics.” 18. Andrew Friedman and Dominic Cornford, Computer Systems Development.
the psychologist Steven Pinker to represent the human brain as the inter- section of Darwin and a computer program.16
But we are running ahead of ourselves. From a historical perspective, this understanding of software as the essence of computing took some time to develop. The first electronic digital computers were simply programma- ble calculators. The pioneering ENIAC machine, for example, was not so much programmed as configured, with each new application requiring ex- tensive preparation, because the machine needed to be rewired using plug cables and mechanical dials. The work involved in “setting up” the com- puter was considered to be low-skilled …
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